@2003 Troy Dunniway – All Rights Reserved.

Designing for an Audience

By Troy Dunniway
troy_dunniway@hotmail.com

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

- Anonymous

Why Do People Play Games?

People like to play games for many reasons. It's important to understand who your
audience is and why those people will buy your game. For whatever reason someone
buys your game, you need to ensure that the player's experience is as fulfilling as
possible. A great game will fill most of these categories for different people.

Fun and Enjoyment

This is the most obvious reason why people like to play games. They're fun - well,
usually. There are a lot of various mediated and unmediated experiences out there that we
find entertaining. Playing games has always been a way in which people find stimulation
and enjoyment.

Interaction
Interaction is one of the reasons why people play games instead of simply engaging in
other story- or narrative-related activities such as reading or watching movies. Games
offer people an opportunity to become actively immersed in a world instead of passively
watching someone else's idea of entertainment.

Fantasy Fulfillment
When people play games, they are allowed to do things that they normally couldn't (or
wouldn't!) do. This can include doing things that aren't feasible or even possible. These
actions can all be done within the safe confines of a game, and the player's only risk is the
cash that he plopped down to buy the product in the first place.

Role Playing
People like to do things in games that they normally wouldn't be allowed to do because of
social restrictions. People love to role-play pirates, vampires, mercenary killers, robbers,
and evil villains of every stripe just as often as they like to play the hero and save the
world.

Safety
Similar to the fulfillment of fantasy, some people enjoy doing things that they don't
consider fantasy but that are more real-world tests of things that they might not ever do.
This could include experimenting with stock market trading, gambling, or flying a plane.
Games provide a safe way to experience simulations of reality.

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Competition
Multiplayer games are predominantly played for competition. People like to play against
each other, whether they're in the same room, down the hall, or somewhere else in the
world. This is half the fun. Games such as Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal have been so
successful that they've spawned versions that can only be played across a network or the
Internet. Competition is also a powerful motivator for sports and driving games. Even if
the game is not played interactively, the player can compete against earlier players'
scores.

Exploration
People like to explore. I believe that this is part of our nature. Until recently, the world
was filled with explorers who traveled the world seeking out new places. Now our only
unexplored areas are deep under water or far into space. Both are probably places that the
average person will never see firsthand. There is something deeply thrilling about
exploring strange new worlds because you never know exactly what's going to be around
that next corner. Why else do people take vacations to new places each year?

Social Interaction
Social interaction in games basically breaks down into three categories: multiplayer (two
or more people in the same room on the same machine); networked multiplayer (the
player is at one computer or console on a network playing against a small group of other
players); or massively multiplayer (thousands of people are networked together, all
controlling individual avatars in a massive game world).

Massively multiplayer games are played by many people purely for social interaction. It
is impossible to "win" a massively multiplayer game; the best that players can do is
increase their social standing and game skills. The game world will live on regardless of
whether player avatars live or die. These games, like the paper-and-pencil role-playing
games from which they are derived, are really more about being part of a community than
accomplishing specific objectives.

You might have heard stories of couples who live far away from each other playing
massively multiplayer games such as Asheron's Call because they can talk and interact in
the world together. For these players, this is a lot more interesting than just talking on the
phone.

Skill Testing
Players like to test their skills. Driving games such as Project Gotham Racing are
examples of games in which players can test their real-world driving skills. Skill testing
is usually related to a real-world skill. Hunting games and flight simulators are other
games that have the same appeal.

We can never know for sure exactly why people play certain kinds of games and not
others. Everyone is different, but you can take advantage of certain trends. Understanding
why people play games and especially understanding why people play the particular
genre of game that you are developing is key to your success. Then, after you have a firm

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grip on why people would want to play the game, you should try to understand who will
be playing your game; there are many levels and kinds of players who play games of the
same genre.

Know Your Audience

There are five dominant markets/audience segments for games:

 Hard-core players typically play more than 10 to 20 hours a week on several

games and own more than one gaming platform or PC.

 Average players like to play games regularly but aren't as serious about it as the
hard-core market.

 Casual gamers usually find a particular game appealing and tend to play it every
once in a while.

 Non-gamers own a computer but don't play games, or another member of the
household owns a game system but they don't use it.

 Kids compose another set of gamers, and are usually similar to casual gamers in
their approach to what and how often they play.

Why do I bring up non-gamers? Are they really an audience if they don't buy games?
Non-gamers actually represent the majority of people in the world. A lot of people with
computers or access to game machines don't play games. Even more non-gamers could
afford to buy a game machine if they wanted to. Understanding non-gamers is just as
important as understanding gamers if you're trying to develop a game for a mass
audience. The industry will grow very quickly if you can convert non-gamers into casual
gamers, especially as more devices such as cell phones are allowing non-gamers to play
simple games.

Even if my game sells a few million copies and is hailed as the best-selling game ever, I
still can't help but wonder why those other 100 million people didn't buy it and what I
could have done to make my product more appealing. Don't completely rule out the non-
gamers; just be aware that if you target only them, it will probably be a losing battle.

So, you need to know who your audience is. It's very important to understand how big
each market is and what the potential sales reality is likely to be. War games are a good
example of a very small niche market that appeals to only a small number of people. War
games are more simulation than game. They adhere to realism and detail, to make the
game appealing more than just trying to do what would be the most fun. If the best-
selling war game in history has only sold 200,000 copies, it's probably unrealistic to
expect your detailed brigade-level simulation of Operation Barbarossa to sell a million
copies.

Knowing these limitations, niche markets can be great to develop for because they mostly
consist of hard-core gamers who long for a game exactly like yours. The problem is that

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these niche markets are usually fairly small. This means that the scale of your project
needs to be set accordingly: Your team needs to be small, your overhead needs to be low,
and you need to market aggressively to these players to make a profit.

It's also important to understand how different markets contribute to the buying, selling,
and reviewing of your game.

Hard-core gamers are usually early adopters and are the most likely to tell their friends
how cool a game is. Magazine reviewers tend to be a hard-core group because they sit
and play games all day. Hopefully they're professional enough to recognize a game that is
targeted toward the casual gamer.

This is different in the movie industry, in which most movie critics tend to like the
Sundance style of artistic movies. When an entertaining Schwarzenegger film or another
light-hearted movie opens, the critics are harsh because this type of film rarely lives up to
their expectations.

As a viewer, my artistic or literary expectations for these light-hearted flicks are low.
Like most people, I go in expecting a fun ride with cheesy dialogue and a lot of
explosions. If the movie delivers this in an entertaining way, I'm a happy camper.

When making and marketing games, it's important to understand this expectation gap.
Hard-core people will expect something completely different than casual gamers will. Be
careful not to try to make or market a game to all audiences or be all things to all people.

Even if your game isn't highly polished, it doesn't hurt to make it worth people's while to
try it. A good example of this is Serious Sam, a very derivative and somewhat cheesy
first-person shooter developed by the CroTeam in Croatia and published by GOD Games.
The publisher knew that it couldn't compete directly with market leaders such as Quake
or Unreal, so it lowered the price to $19.95 and managed to sell a lot of copies to casual
gamers.

There are many kinds of gamers out there. Some games might appeal to everyone,
whereas others might appeal to only a certain subset of people. It's just important to
understand who your audience really is and that it's not always best for you to try to
create a game that does appeal to everyone. Not everyone will like a game that is made
for everyone, especially your hard-core players who are tough to appeal to. Therefore, I
will attempt to define, as much as is possible, the different kinds of players out there and
what you need to do to appeal to them. This definition is always different for different
genres of games and can change as more people play games. So, you will ultimately need
to decide where the final line is drawn and what that line means. I will focus on the game
players and will not include nongamers or kids in this discussion.

Designing Games for Hard-Core Game Players

Whether you're creating a super hard-core game that appeals only to hardcore gamers or a
game geared toward "everyone," it's important to understand what makes a hard-core

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gamer a hard-core gamer and why they are different from everybody else. Core gamers
have these characteristics:

 Are jaded by other games they've already played

 Usually have strong opinions (and are not shy about sharing them with others of
their ilk)

 Often like one kind (genre) of game

 Often only like a specific theme of game (sci-fi, fantasy, history, and so on)

 Have very strong ideas about what makes a good game

 Expect a lot for their money

 Are willing to play games that require a steep learning curve

 Like depth of game play

 Like to know every detail of the game, including every statistic and every value
that affects them

 Like games that they can customize or modify

 Like games that they can expand

 Sticks to one genre and isn't necessarily a hard-core gamer in all genres

 Are more likely to voice their opinions

 Spend more time reading gaming magazines and websites than anyone else

 Usually are connected to the Internet

 Usually buy at least three or four games every month.

 Tend to socialize with other gamers a lot

 Usually are more likely to try to work through problems that they are having
rather than give up on the game

 Don't like patching PC games, but know how and are willing to do it

 When playing multiplayer games, expect everything to be fair on the playing field

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The hard part is knowing how to really use this information to design games. There is no
clear-cut way. Ultimately, hard-core gamers like things a certain way and have strong
expectations that need to be met. Core gamers also know when their expectations aren't
met, and they are more likely to tell you and others what they think and how they were let
down. Even though the core-gamer market might be small and you could look at the
number of core gamers and try to ignore them, you ultimately also have to understand
that these are the early adopters. Core gamers are the ones who can drive the market by
telling their friends and others what they like. So, it's not good to always ignore them as a
market, unless you're trying to create a game on the opposite spectrum for casual gamers.

Designing Games for Casual Game Players

Casual gamers can be a tough group to appeal to. Some casual gamers just aren't turned
on by that many games. The Sims is a game that found a perfect balance of easy features
and addictiveness that many casual gamers seem to like. Causal gamers have historically
enjoyed games such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims, Tetris, Myst, and Who Wants to
be a Millionaire?. Casual gamers also tend to have busier schedules than hard-core
gamers.

Many casual gamers are people with families. When developing for casual gamers, you
also have to remember that the casual computer player typically has a lower-end
computer than a hard-core player, so the minimum system spec that you design your
game for also needs to be much lower.

Casual players tend to like these game characteristics:

 Simplified character growth and customization

 Minimal character creation

 Growth based on actions within game context

 No stat tweaking

 Shorter game-play times

 High density of interactionssomething to deal with every few seconds

 Short-, mid-, and long-term goals

 Ramp-up of complexity/challenge

 Choice of skills

 Various types of things to interact with

 Places to go

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 A minimal or transparent user interface

 Skills improvement based on use

 New skills gained with experience

 Visual indication of skill proficiency/power

There are a variety of things that you should do as a designer to appeal to a broader
audience:

 Get the player into your game quickly.

 Minimize the character-creation phase (if relevant for your game).

 Make character growth meaningful, and make it happen through game actions,
not stat twiddling.

 Make sure that the player always has something to do.

 Provide short-term, midterm, and long-term goals.

 Provide players with new experiences as they grow.

 Guide players through experiences designed for newbies, and show them how to
advance.

 Create compelling enemies and antagonists.

 Create stronger, more relevant story elements.

Designing Games for a Mixed Audience

Finding the happy medium of how to design a game for both the casual market and the
hard-core market as well as everyone in between is very hard. Not very many games have
accomplished this goal successfully. As a general rule of thumb, you must design a casual
game but make it fun enough and addicting enough for hard-core players to appreciate it.

This is a dangerous goal, though. By trying to appeal to both audiences, you might
develop a game that is too complicated for the casual gamer or too simple for the hard-
core player. If you're trying to create a very broad mass-market game, it's best to try to
run as many focus group tests on the idea as possible before you get too far along. Test
the concept with both sets of players, and see how they respond to it.

Designing for Kids

Designing for kids presents a number of challenges different from those designing for
adults. In fact, kids can be divided into at least three vastly different audiences: ages
younger than 8, ages 8-12, and ages 12-16. Depending on the target age, interfaces and

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game play must be kept simple and free of any text because the youngest kids can't read.
However, designing a simple, fun game for kids is far more difficult than simply
"dumbing down" a more complex game.

To design well for kids, you need to thoroughly understand children's capabilities,
interests, and attitudes. In the younger age ranges, parents are making the buying
decisions, and games with educational content typically sell better than pure
entertainment games. These games are often designed for kids and their parents at the
same time, with some features such as preferences and educational performance tracking
included solely for the parents. Products featuring licensed characters and brands
dominate the kids' market. Given the vast differences between designing for adults and
children, designing for kids is not covered in detail in this book.

Wrapping It Up
If it were easy to make a great game, there would be more of them out there. No matter
how you gauge your level of success, it's important to set realistic goals for yourself and
try to achieve them during your project. It's not very realistic to think that you can
develop a AAA title that sells millions of units for a few hundred thousand dollars (or
even for a few million dollars!), but it is occasionally possible. Professionals in the
business have said to me that they can develop a game that is much better than Metal
Gear Solid and that they and their team of 15 people can do it in 16 months for $2
million. This is completely unrealistic: Metal Gear Solid took years, many millions of
dollars, and hundreds of people to create. For many kinds of games, you expect to
compete with the big boys unless you do it their way, to some extent. However, games
such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, Deer Hunter, Counter Strike, and Serious Sam continue
to prove us wrong.

Knowing what your market is like, what the people are like who want to play your game,
and who will buy your game and why are all very relevant questions. These questions can
help you gauge whether your idea can be realized by your team in a way that ultimately
makes your game appealing to your audience. Know what makes for a great game,
understand the importance of game play, know why people play games, know your
audience, and know what is possible then you can create the best game possible with
what you have. If you understand the market well, you will have a much better chance of
giving your game appeal and seeing it sell.

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